Take-Home Pay Calculator
Estimate Your Paycheck After Taxes
Your salary isn't your spending power. This calculator strips out 2026 federal tax, FICA and your state's real income tax to show the cash that actually lands in your bank — the number you should use when sizing a mortgage.
Your pay
Updates instantly as you type. 2026 federal brackets and FICA limits.
Pre-tax deductions
Lower your taxable income and your take-home — but raise your savings.
State income tax uses a simplified resident-wage model for 2026. Local city taxes (e.g. NYC, Philadelphia) are not included.
From $4,615 gross per paycheck · effective tax rate 26.1%
Federal taxes
State tax
Pre-tax deductions
What gets pulled out of your paycheck — and why it matters for buying a home
Lenders qualify you on gross income, but your real budget runs on net pay. Knowing the gap between the two is the difference between a comfortable mortgage and one that owns you.
1. Federal income tax (2026 brackets)
2. FICA — Social Security + Medicare
3. State income tax — the wild card
4. Pre-tax benefits — savings disguised as deductions
Why we built this into the home-affordability flow
Why your paycheck is smaller than your salary
Almost every financial rule of thumb — including the ones lenders use to decide what house you can afford — is written against gross income. But gross income is a number you never actually touch. What lands in your account is what pays the mortgage, the groceries, and everything else. Understanding the gap between the two is the difference between a budget that works and one that looks fine on a spreadsheet and fails in practice.
The deductions, in the order they happen
Your gross pay gets reduced in a specific sequence, and the order matters. Pre-tax deductions come out first — traditional 401(k) contributions, HSA contributions, and most health insurance premiums. Because they're taken before income tax is calculated, they lower your taxable income, which means they cost you less than their face value. But they don't all work the same way: HSA contributions and Section 125 health premiums also reduce your FICA wages, while traditional 401(k) contributions do not — Social Security and Medicare are still calculated on that money. After income tax and FICA come state income tax, where it applies, and then any post-tax deductions like Roth contributions. Two people with identical salaries can take home noticeably different amounts purely because of how they've set up these first steps.
Your tax bracket doesn't mean what most people think
The single most common misunderstanding about income tax is that your bracket applies to your whole salary. It doesn't. The US uses a progressive system: each portion of your income is taxed at the rate for its own bracket. Moving into a higher bracket only affects the dollars above that threshold, not everything you earned. This is why a raise never leaves you with less money, despite the persistent myth. The rate that actually matters for budgeting is your effective rate — total tax divided by total income — which is always lower than your top bracket.
FICA is flat, and it stops
Social Security and Medicare come out of nearly every paycheck at fixed rates: Social Security at 6.2% of wages up to an annual cap that adjusts each year, and Medicare at 1.45% with no cap at all. High earners pay an additional Medicare surtax of 0.9% on wages above a threshold. The Social Security cap is worth knowing about if you're a high earner: once you cross it during the year, that deduction stops and your take-home pay jumps for the remaining paychecks. That's not a raise — it's the same annual income arriving unevenly, and budgeting around the higher late-year paychecks is a mistake.
Where you live can change your paycheck by thousands
State income tax is the largest source of variation between otherwise identical salaries. Some states have no income tax at all. Others use a flat rate. Others are progressive with rates that climb meaningfully at higher incomes. A few cities add their own local income tax on top. If you're comparing job offers in different states, or thinking about relocating, comparing gross salaries alone is misleading — the same offer can be worth substantially more or less depending on where the work happens. Bear in mind that low-income-tax states often compensate with higher property or sales taxes, so the full picture includes what you'll pay as a homeowner too.
The connection to what house you can afford
This is where take-home pay stops being trivia. Lenders qualify you using gross income and the 28/36 ratios, which means the maximum they'll approve is calculated against money you never see. If your effective tax rate and deductions take a large bite — a high-tax state, generous retirement contributions, family health premiums — the payment a lender considers acceptable can be a much larger share of your actual paycheck than the ratio implies. Running your real net pay against a prospective mortgage payment is the honest test, and it's often the one that reveals a comfortable-looking approval is tighter than it appears.
The levers you actually control
Most of your withholding is fixed by law, but a few things are genuinely in your hands. Increasing pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions lowers your taxable income now, though it also lowers your immediate take-home pay — you're trading present cash for future savings and a smaller tax bill. Adjusting your W-4 changes how much is withheld per paycheck; over-withholding produces a large refund, which feels good but means you lent the government money interest-free all year, while under-withholding risks a bill and possible penalties. The goal isn't the biggest refund. It's withholding that closely matches what you actually owe, so your money arrives when you can use it.